Volunteers work to clean, weigh and measure the more than 400 cold-stunned turtles rescued from shallow waters near South Padre Island.

Volunteers work to clean, weigh and measure the more than 400 cold-stunned turtles rescued from shallow waters near South Padre Island.

Photo: Lynn Brezosky, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

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Volunteer Dennis Sullivan, a winter Texan from Chicago, works with Coast Guard members to rescue green sea turtles from the shores of South Padre Island on Friday, Feb. 4, 2011.

Volunteer Dennis Sullivan, a winter Texan from Chicago, works with Coast Guard members to rescue green sea turtles from the shores of South Padre Island on Friday, Feb. 4, 2011.

Photo: Lynn Brezosky, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

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Volunteer Tom Wilson, a student at UT-Brownsville, helps weigh and measure green sea turtles at the UT-Pan American Coastal Studies lab on South Padre Island. More than 400 cold-stunned turtles were rescued from shallow waters near the island.

Volunteer Tom Wilson, a student at UT-Brownsville, helps weigh and measure green sea turtles at the UT-Pan American Coastal Studies lab on South Padre Island. More than 400 cold-stunned turtles were rescued

Volunteer Tom Wilson, a student at UT-Brownsville, helps weigh and measure green sea turtles at the UT-Pan American Coastal Studies lab on South Padre Island. More than 400 cold-stunned turtles were rescued from shallow waters near the island.

Volunteer Tom Wilson, a student at UT-Brownsville, helps weigh and measure green sea turtles at the UT-Pan American Coastal Studies lab on South Padre Island. More than 400 cold-stunned turtles were rescued

Volunteers work to clean, weigh, and measure the more than 400 cold-stunned turtles rescued from shallow waters near South Padre Island at the UT-Pan American Coastal Studies Lab on Friday, Feb. 4, 2011.

Volunteers work to clean, weigh, and measure the more than 400 cold-stunned turtles rescued from shallow waters near South Padre Island at the UT-Pan American Coastal Studies Lab on Friday, Feb. 4, 2011.

Photo: Lynn Brezosky, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

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Valley out of the ice but still in cold

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BROWNSVILLE — The snow was through with South Texas on Friday, but the ice-stunned Rio Grande Valley was about to endure its coldest night of the week, with temperatures plummeting as the sky cleared.

Snow flurries kissed South Padre Island and areas as far west as Zapata County early Friday, but most of the Valley was left shrouded in an icy mist that frosted neighborhoods and weighed down palm trees.

Schools and colleges were closed. Shelters stayed open in 10 cities.

Amid record demand for power, AEP Texas reported more than 55,000 customers without power, due to a combination of rolling outages and scattered infrastructure failures.

Most people huddled in blankets or found friends with generators and space heaters as more than 80 crews worked to restore service to a four-county area.

By late afternoon, some 44,000 customers still were without power and about to face darkness again.

On a related note, Bloomberg reported Friday that the Public Utility Commission has asked an independent power market monitor to investigate the events surrounding Wednesday's rolling blackouts as intense cold gripped the state.

As of about 6 p.m., just one leg of highway in Harlingen remained closed because a shadow from an overpass blocked sunlight from thawing its ice.

“The forecast is looking favorable for no closures,” Rodriguez said. “Of course, that could change.”

State troopers and local police departments continued to report vehicle wrecks — Willacy County alone had about 20 on Thursday night in a two-hour period, including a fatal single-vehicle rollover.

The death toll for marine life remained to be seen. Texas Parks and Wildlife officials feared a fish kill on a scale that claimed millions during the freeze of 1989.

A network of volunteers rescuing sea turtles along the shores of Laguna Madre and South Padre planned to move as many as 300 convalescing turtles to the Texas State Aquarium in Corpus Christi before another cold front arrives next week.

“The temperature in the Laguna Madre is not going to rebound very quickly, and these guys, probably half of them, are coming out of hypothermia,” Sea Turtle Inc. curator Jeff George said. “We need to get them in a little bit of heated water, tepid water.”

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George said the number of rescued turtles had surpassed 500 — a record far beyond the scores of rescues conducted in 2007 and 2010.

“We were out of power and looking for something to do, and so we started hauling turtles,” said Dennis Sullivan, a Winter Texan who with wife Kay spent Friday shuttling cold-stunned turtles found by Coast Guard patrols to the lab.

It was triage in the lab, with turtles of all sizes in tanks and kiddy pools and covering every available inch of blanketed floor space, some twitching their flippers slowly in a sign of returning life .